I don't much live my life as if I was living in a Raymond Chandler novel, which is probably a good thing.

Some suggestions for you :

I don't have to write about the future. For most people, the present is enough like the future to be pretty scary.

When I start writing a novel, I have no sense of direction, no idea, really nothing.

I'm a reluctant writer of non-fiction, in part because I don't really feel qualified.

The thing that 'Neuromancer' predicts as being actually like the Internet isn't actually like the Internet at all!

The people I hang out with tend to use Macs, not that I think they're necessarily superior.

I guess Twitter is the first thing that has been attractive to me as social media. I never felt the least draw to Facebook or MySpace. I've been involved anonymously in some tiny listservs, mainly in my ceaseless quest for random novelty, and sometimes while doing something that more closely resembles research.

As a writer of fiction who deals with technology, I necessarily deal with the history of technology and the history of technologically induced social change. I roam up and down it in a kind of special way because I roam down it into history, which is invariably itself a speculative affair.

I've become convinced that nostalgia is a fundamentally unhealthy modality. When you see it, it's usually attached to something else that's really, seriously bad. I don't traffic in nostalgia. We're becoming a global culture.

I try to be objective about technology. Agnostic, in a sense. Whatever personal opinions I form tend to have more to do with what we find to do with the new thing.

I read a great deal of science fiction with consummate pleasure between, say, the ages of 12 and 16. Then I got away from it. In my mid- to late 20s, I started trying to write it.

Futurists get to a certain age and, as one does, they suddenly recognize their own mortality.

I was afraid to watch 'Blade Runner' in the theater because I was afraid the movie would be better than what I myself had been able to imagine. In a way, I was right to be afraid, because even the first few minutes were better.

I've never really been very interested in computers themselves. I don't watch them; I watch how people behave around them. That's becoming more difficult to do because everything is around them.

I can't imagine writing a book without some strong female characters, unless that was a demand of the setting.